When it was time for Hayden O’Donnell-Downer to start school, her parents had no doubts about where to send her.

Theresa O’Donnell and Christa Downer believed deeply in traditional public schooling. They were committed to sending Hayden to their neighborhood school, Alex Sanger Elementary, a handsome red-brick building set amid both wealth and poverty in the Forest Hills area of East Dallas.

Three years later, they made the frustrating and painful decision to give up on Sanger, and on the Dallas Independent School District. And more than a dozen families they persuaded to join them at Sanger gave up along with them.

These days, conflicts between school board members and Superintendent Mike Miles seem to define DISD — or, at least, its public face. But the struggles that O’Donnell and Downer encountered at Sanger may say more about the school system’s troubles. DISD needs to attract middle-class families to succeed. What does it say about the system if two committed parents — a top city of Dallas official and a university professor — can’t keep faith with their neighborhood school?

“The bureaucracy just beat us, and that’s too bad, because what’s going to happen next?” asked O’Donnell, an assistant city manager and no stranger to bureaucracy. The problems ran a gamut, O’Donnell said, from the couple’s belief that Sanger’s dual-language program was getting short shrift, to a decision by the principal to cut out sports and recess in the name of improved test scores.

A DISD spokesman said the school is improving in many ways and cited renewed focus on the dual-language program. He said he was unaware that sports and recess had been cut.

For O’Donnell and Downer — and other families they brought into the school — those positive changes are too late and too few. The O’Donnell-Downer children are now home-schooled, and the couple have crafted a two-year plan to set up a charter school they hope will fulfill the expectations they placed in Sanger.

Others who once joined their movement for Sanger have turned to private schools. Some remained believers in Sanger and DISD. The problem wasn’t with Sanger, they suggest. It was with O’Donnell and Downer.

“Everybody expects different things,” said Norma Fuentes, who was elected to Sanger’s Parent Teacher Association board with the support of O’Donnell and Downer. The principal, Hector Martinez, “was trying to give them more long-term solutions, and they wanted immediate changes.”

Fuentes said she respected O’Donnell and Downer’s decision to remove their two daughters from DISD. But she said she’s happy with Sanger, where her own daughters are enrolled. Things are improving, she said.

Testing focus

O’Donnell said she reached a point where she could not risk her children’s education while she waited for reforms to take root at the school. One problem, she said, was a relentless focus on testing — and on drilling to prepare for testing.

“We were concerned about the drilling, because kids were not learning, and they were not developing a love of learning,” she said. She added that administrators seemed deaf to her concerns.

Even though the emphasis on test scores was a topic of frequent discussion between the PTA board and the principal, little was done to shift classroom priorities away from test preparation, she said.

“The test is their customer — not the parents or kids,” she said

For O’Donnell and Downer, the journey at Sanger began two years before Hayden started kindergarten. They formed an Early Childhood PTA and began recruiting families to the school.

In 2010, when it was time for Hayden to begin school, O’Donnell wrote an essay for The Dallas Morning News’ Points section extolling the Jeffersonian ideal of public education. She asked her fellow Dallas residents for a “recommitment by the entire community” to quality education for all children through the public schools.

O’Donnell and Downer spent countless hours at the school. Downer ultimately gave up her job as a professor of women’s studies to volunteer full time at Sanger.

The couple helped start a small food bank to provide weekend meals to poor families at Sanger. They set up field trips and looked for grant money. They formed a student orchestra, planted a school garden and chartered the PTA. Improving Sanger became the most important project in their lives.

The school’s challenges were no secret.

More than 80 percent of its students are economically disadvantaged, according to the Texas Education Agency. More than 60 percent have limited command of English. Two in three students are considered “at risk” to drop out of school.

Recruiting parents

Still, O’Donnell and Downer believed that with a strong commitment from parents like them, Sanger could become one of DISD’s finest elementary schools. They envisioned something like Hexter Elementary School in White Rock, with its multiethnic, academically high-achieving student population.

In Forest Hills and other neighborhoods near Sanger, people listened.

“Theresa and Christa were the force around here, getting people from the surrounding neighborhoods to attend this school together,” said one parent who pulled her two sons from Sanger this year.

Dan and Angela Perge were among those persuaded by O’Donnell and Downer. They enrolled their two children in Sanger. Today, the Perge children are home-schooled alongside the O’Donnell-Downer girls.

“All I’d ever heard from people in our neighborhood was, ‘Don’t go there, we are going to private,’” Perge said. “But we had done all this work, campaigning, talking, encouraging, saying let’s give this a try. We had a good rush of solid parents that came in.”

Ultimately, it didn’t work, Perge said. Several families who came in with O’Donnell had trouble getting along with Sanger’s principal, Larry Allen.

Allen, who retired last year, has been praised for the way he ran Sanger for almost 20 years. He was twice nominated for DISD principal of the year. But O’Donnell and other parents found him reluctant to push the school to the next level or to work with the middle-class parents who sought to embrace Sanger.

O’Donnell recalled an effort to get Allen to open the school earlier for kids dropped off by bus. She worried that these students were unsupervised in the school yard, sometimes in bad weather. Allen wasn’t responsive to the request, she said.

Allen declined to comment.

Things got no better when Martinez replaced Allen, O’Donnell said. The succession process itself was a problem. DISD officials promised parents a voice in picking Sanger’s new leader, but they never got it, O’Donnell said.

In other schools, “they make it clear the parents and PTA don’t have hiring authority, but they are at least given the opportunity to meet the candidates and ask some questions,” she said.

“We got a principal installed without ever having gone through that process.”

Things declined from there, she said.

Kelly Kemp, who eventually moved her sons to St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic School, said even small efforts to build up Sanger became struggles. Some parents found the money to fix up an overgrown baseball field, but the school's prior administration wouldn’t make the improvements, she said. She couldn’t gain access to Sanger to hold a fundraising chili cookoff; school administrators told parents the school couldn’t hire the custodial staff needed to open the school for the event.

“We wanted to make improvements to the school to help these teachers, who for the most part were so dedicated to the children. But the red tape was ridiculous,” she said.

Downer said Martinez once canceled recess and a field trip to Southern Methodist University because of poor test scores. A DISD spokesman disputed that, saying no children were ever prevented from attending any field trip based on test scores.

Dan Perge, who volunteered as soccer coach, said sports were cut, even though they could be used to help motivate students to do better academically.

Always, parents said, the focus was on raising test scores, at the expense of everything else.

“Why are we working so hard for these test scores? No one could tell us the benefit,” Kemp said.

She decided the school simply wasn’t interested in serving middle-class families, she said. O’Donnell came to the same conclusion.

“DISD has given up on the middle class, and the middle class has given up on DISD,” O’Donnell said.

Happy at Sanger

Jon Dahlander, spokesman for DISD, said the district serves people of all economic backgrounds. “We do not — nor should we — give preferential treatment to parents of any particular economic background,” he said.

And many Sanger parents believe the school does reach out to the middle class.

Kelly Clayton’s son has just started kindergarten at Sanger, and the family loves the school. “There’s a wonderful sense of community with people in the neighborhood,” she said.

She’s sorry O’Donnell and Downer have moved on. Their contributions were big. But sometimes, things just don’t work out, Clayton said. “You’re going to find that at any school, whether it’s public or private,” she said.

Dahlander called O’Donnell and Downer’s decision to leave unfortunate. The couple brought a great deal of energy to Sanger, he said. “Things like this happen sometimes,” he said. “We wish them the best as they start their new school.”

But he said Sanger is making progress. Its enrollment has grown from 490 in 2011 to 563 this year, he said. There have been efforts to improve the dual-language program, intervene with struggling students and involve parents in the school.

He also cited improvements in test scores from last year to this year in nine of 11 categories.

O’Donnell said standardized tests and the way they’re scored have changed, making it difficult to track progress over many years. In any case, it’s clear that Sanger is not up to par with DISD’s best elementary schools, she said. This year, the school met state academic standards and earned distinction for student progress when compared with similar schools. But it earned no distinction for achievement in math or reading.

To O’Donnell, the scores were always less important than the school’s approach to education. She decided that her daughters weren’t getting a good education, and that all of Sanger’s children were paying a steep price to improve test scores.

Their dream school

Today, the O’Donnell-Downer family room is a classroom. Every morning, Angela Perge and Downer go through their lesson plan with the children. A little bookshelf serves as the library. Spanish-language posters and teaching aids hang on the wall. Every Friday, the mothers and their children take a field trip.

“I love it,” Downer said. “I’m just so happy to be this engaged in their education.”

Perge, who left her job as a software engineer to raise her children, said she never imagined that it would involve home schooling. “Most people that know me can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said. “We are public school people who are home-schooling.”

Meanwhile, Downer spends many evenings working on plans for the charter school. Charters are the only path forward for public education in Dallas, she and O’Donnell have decided.

They dream of a school that will serve children from all backgrounds. It will offer services to families needing extra support, and it will provide the sort of education that their children weren’t getting in DISD, they said.

It wasn’t that her family didn’t want Sanger anymore. It’s that Sanger never really seemed to want them, O’Donnell said.

“It doesn’t matter if you are at Dallas City Hall or DISD” or the Texas Department of Transportation, she said. “Government is about participation. The better participation, the better quality you receive.”

*This article has been amended to reflect the following corrections:

A front-page story on Sunday about Sanger Elementary School incorrectly quoted a former Sanger
parent as saying the school's principal, Hector Martinez, denied
parents access to the school to put on a fundraising chili cookoff. The
parent said that decision was made under the school's previous
administration. After the story was published, Martinez disputed a
different parent's claim that a field trip to Southern Methodist
University was canceled because of poor test scores. No such
cancellation occurred, he said. Before publication, a Dallas Independent
School District spokesman was asked about the trip and did not respond.

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